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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Food Bill, NREGA prone to corruption: CBI director Ranjit Sinha -Aman Sharma

Food Bill, NREGA prone to corruption: CBI director Ranjit Sinha -Aman Sharma

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published Published on Nov 11, 2013   modified Modified on Nov 11, 2013
-The Economic Times


NEW DELHI: CBI director Ranjit Sinha has said infrastructure building through the public-private partnership model could lead to a spike in corruption cases as the potentially lucrative contracts may encourage collusion between big firms and state officials.

"This route is full of pitfalls and it has opportunities for corrupt activities with big scope for collusion among promoters of consortiums to whom such projects are awarded and corrupt public servants at the decision-making level," Sinha said while addressing a training academy in MP on November 6.

"Deep concerns have been expressed in various quarters about the PPP route being adopted for creation of core infrastructure like power or roads, ports and airports, chemicals and petrochemicals."

Sinha voiced concern over increasing the FDI limit in infrastructure projects and said government-run social sector schemes such as NREGA are prone to corruption. Sinha's remark comes at a time when the agency is probing many companies and industrialists for irregularities in the coal block allocation scandal.

There is also a pending law to give retired babus 'protection' of prior sanction for prosecution, but Sinha advocated scrapping the provision even for serving officers in graft and disproportionate asset cases. "The proposed Right to Food Bill is going to cost the public exchequer an astounding Rs 1 lakh crore every year.

It is going to be a formidable challenge to ensure that these huge outlays are converted into outcomes and are not just siphoned off, and this will rightly be yet another area of concern for corruption...," he said, referring to social sector schemes like National Rural Employment Guarantee and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Sinha spoke about increasing FDI in infrastructure projects in the same vein.

"Mobilisation and management of FDI are going to be facets of governance that will attract kickbacks and corruption, if not handled with care," he said. While the UPA has been talking of its efforts to open up the country to globalisation, Sinha said these developments might have contributed to the problem of corruption.

"There have been a number of cases where the underlying mantra of globalisation is observed to be benefiting the business house and not the country. The decision-making process has been invariably distorted in favour of projects, which benefit a few rather than many."

On corporate lobbyists, he said, "The exercise of discretionary powers by corrupt officials involves the policy of pick-andchoose... What would be the best model or procedure for allocating the scarce resources on an equitable and fair basis, while maintaining the balance of economic development?

This is a question on which would depend the degree and scope of corruption in that particular sector of economy..." Sinha said: "The real estate sector has found a highly debatable place in the list of corruptionprone areas.

Acquisition of land for public purposes can have big socio-political overtones. The question which demands our interest is about the extent to which builder mafia is conniving with a set of corrupt officials."


The Economic Times, 11 November, 2013, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/food-bill-nrega-prone-to-corruption-cbi-director-ranjit-sinha/articleshow/25569959.cms


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